Friday, October 4, 2013

We Haven't Scared Them Away Yet

The small amount of meetings we have had so far this year have been really exciting because all of the sophomores and new seniors keep coming back. We haven't scared them away yet!

The meeting on Thursday started with Bydlon giving a quick tutorial on the social media that our team does. He showed off the blog, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. He also went over how to use Google Drive and Gmail for those that weren't familiar.

Carson was up next. He did a slide show about "Preparing for a Competition". It's really informative and great for rookies to see before offseason competitions and Regionals/Districts. It covers pit design, scouting, team spirit, schedule, and lots of pictures.Check it out here!

After all of that listening, everyone was ready for some action.

Lacey, Tyler, Molly, and Bryce fixed up our robot cart. The front right wheel was not securely bolted so it would roll sideways. It was not a good situation. So they drilled through the cart and added a longer bolt. They also added a place to have an extension cable. Our laptop battery is really bad so we need electricity whenever possible.

We set up the practice field and gave everyone a chance to drive and shoot Frisbees. All of the team members also practiced setting the robot up for Autonomous. It was really fun to watch the rookies learning the controls and improve quickly.

At Minnesota Robotics Invitational in about a week, we will have 3 drive teams. Bryce will be on the #1 team, and the other two teams will be full of sophomores. They will take turns driving in matches.

Unfortunately, one of the sophomores, Jon, made the robot get into a little accident with the pyramid. This made our blocker for directing Frisbees into our ramp crumble. However, that piece was already broken so it was good thing to fix it. Also, it gave us a chance to fix our wheel spacers and the hinges holding the shooter board to the drive base. Soooo, it wasn't great that we had a driving accident, but the fixes we made were necessary and the accident pushed us to make them. The robot is in much better shape now than it was.

The computer lab was also very busy at the meeting. Kacy was doing a great job of directing activities up there.

One of our teams big goals for this year is making our blog a better resource and more useful. Brooklyn and Alicia continued editing and adding to the Team Member profiles. Check out the updates here. Heidi took profile pictures so you can expect to see those on the blog next week. Mitch and Tyler made a Parent FAQ sheet. You can visit that here.

Jade worked on finding more sponsor opportunities in our community. We started an FTC team this year so finding more funding is definitely a priority. A bunch of other people compiled our PR pit scouting information from our Regional last year (a little late but that's ok). You can see the compiled answers here. We also made binders for pit scouting at MRI and match scouting sheets. You can see those at this link.

What a busy day!! It's incredible how much we can all accomplish in one meeting!